Occupy Wall Street: movements and manifestos

Occupy Wall Street has been attracting a lot of attention, at least in the parts of the Internet I visit regularly. Most of the commentary I’ve seen so far, including from activists, is doubtful about the protesters’ ability to force change: numbers at the protests are increasing and unions are beginning to join in, but they’re up against a powerful system (and harsh policing). If you live in a society where the wealthiest 1% of the population control around 43 percent of the wealth (as of 2007) and income inequality is rising, a better deal for the 99 percent requires massive structural change.

Still, there’s a lot of optimism around the Occupy Wall Street protests. People in the US want to believe that things might get better. For those of outside the US, a shift in domestic politics gives some hope that the US might start playing a different role in the international system. The reasons to hope are small, but there are times when you cling to them anyway.

As the protests grow, those both within and outside the movement are starting to raise questions about what those involved in Occupy Wall Street want to achieve. As Betsy Reed put it, we’re seeing more and more demands for demands: “their failure to present demands is the most frequently heard criticism of the OWS protesters, not just in the mainstream press but from veteran leftists as well. What do these wan, angry young people want, anyway?”

WSF 2007 Proposals for Action

The demand for demands isn’t new. One of the recurring critiques of the alter-globalisation movement was that it needed to be more organised. George Monbiot’s The Age of Consent was a good example of this: he argued that the movement needed to grow up, develop a manifesto and a program (which he was nice enough to provide an outline for), and start implementing it. This was also a debate that started happening around the World Social Forum fairly early on: what was it meant to achieve? What were its demands?

I understand why people want manifestos and plans for action. It makes it easier to understand the movement, easier to organise and find targets and gauge progress. Occupy Wall St has put out its first official statement, but it’s a long way away from the tightly-worded manifesto that many are calling for: it lists participants’ grievances, but there’s little attempt to connect these grievances within a coherent overarching analysis or to create an all-inclusive list of complaints. I don’t think this is a problem. In fact, I think there are a quite a few reasons to be cautious about pinning down the movement and its goals.

Firstly, the movement is still growing. Occupy Wall Street has, so far, been emphasising the importance of direct democracy. It’s mentioned several times in the first official statement, and is clear in the focus on using consensus decision-making and affinity groups to work through strategies and tactics. (This hasn’t been without problems, including the reproduction of existing privilege.) Handing out a manifesto now means that those who join the movement after that point can sign up to the manifesto, but won’t be able to help shape it.

Occupy Wall St, courtesy of Flickr user emilydickinsonridesabmx

Secondly, I’m not sure that anyone is able to tell, at this stage, just what’s possible. Should the movement be calling for relatively reformist (and hence more achievable) goals, or calling for the broad structural change that’s needed? Given the current US political situation, calling for policy goals that seem achievable today will mean falling far short of providing accessible healthcare and housing, or committing to workers’ rights. Refusing to put out a manifesto leaves the movement free to experiment with what might be possible without either being tied down to relatively limited change or being criticised for utopian goals.

Thirdly, and on a related note, when people start calling for the movement’s demands they often mean: which specific policy changes do you want? Policy changes are certainly required, but the potential for them seems limited. The US political system is a mess, and heavily shaped by economic power. If real change is going to happen, people may need to start thinking about direct action as well as trying to change the political structures that currently shape the US, if only to provide local safety nets. This kind of political imagination isn’t necessarily easily captured in the list of demands that people want to see.

Finally, it might be useful to think about what’s happening on Wall Street as a space, rather than a movement. As Chico Whitaker (2004, p. 111) wrote about the World Social Forum:

movements and spaces are completely different things. Without over simplifying things in a Manichechean way, either they are one or the other. Nevertheless, they can co-exist. Nor are they opposites, which means that they do not neutralise each other, but rather, they may even be counterparts. … Movements and spaces may be seeking, each one performing its roles, the same general objectives. But each one works in a way of its own, aiming at different specific objectives.

This sprang to mind when I read this in Manissa McCleave Maharawal’s article:

It was that it felt like a space of possibility, a space of radical imagination. And it was energizing to feel like such a space existed. And so I started telling my friends to go down there and check it out. I started telling people that it was a pretty awesome thing, that just having a space to have these conversations mattered, that it was more diverse than I expected. And I went back.

There’s value in having a space to organise, both literal and metaphorical, in feeling that there is a space where you can talk about the things that matter to you, where you can meet with other people who care and what to create change. Action needs to come out of that, but not at the expense of shutting down the space itself.

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§ 7 Responses to Occupy Wall Street: movements and manifestos

What do the terms of art “space” and “movement” mean in this context? (Google and Wikipedia have been unhelpful, and your link doesn’t work.)

I think I’m largely in agreement with those wanting a manifesto or list of demands. Call me cynical, but it’s easy to say “this sucks”. It’s harder to say “here is how we should make it better”. It’s harder again to get to the stage of “we are now convincing the people who have access to wealth and power to support us in our aims”. Not in any way saying that these protests are a bad thing, though.

Sorry, I should have explained. “Movement” is a fairly loose term, but it means: ““a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target authorities” that uses a particular repertoire of tactics on behalf of a group of people that claim to be worthy, united, numerous, and committed (Tilly, 2004, pp. 3–4). In addition to this, some scholars have argued for the importance of network structures (della Porta and Diani, 1999, p. 159) and collective identity (della Porta and Diani, 1999, p. 24) as defining features of social movements.” I hope that makes sense! (I could include the full references, but I suspect that would be overkill. This is a definition that I happened to have lying around in a thing I’m writing at the moment.) A space is a forum where discussion and organising can take place, but doesn’t have the same requirements of unity and action.

Maybe I’m cynical too, but I agree that it’s harder to say “here is how we should make it better”. I think that’s something that people need to be working out, I’m just not sure that manifestos or unanimous ‘plans of action’ are the best ways to do so.

I’m also not sure that it’s possible to convince people with access to wealth and power to support the protesters in their aims. I don’t think that the system takes the form that it does because the 1% simply haven’t heard the right arguments – it’s not a matter of just need to work out a persuasive case for change. The 1%, by definition, have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Some of them may choose to give up their privilege and help to change the system, but most don’t seem to have an interest in doing so.

Thanks for the explanation! And thanks for blogging about this too btw, has encouraged me to think a bit more about these kinds of ideas.

“Support” was probably a bad choice of words. But unless you’re going to go around guillotining everyone who gets in your way, I can’t see how anything is going to change unless you convince those who currently have money/power to relinquish those things, in some very broad sense of “convince”. The vested interests have far more influence over the democratic system than people would have thought possible a few hundred years ago.

Otherwise, largely agree with you (and your reply to my other comment).

As far as I can tell, the Tobin Tax idea is a good one, and has been floating around for quite some time. However, I don’t think it’d do as the central demand from the movement, because it wouldn’t fix a lot of the problems with the US political system.

[…] protests is exacerbated by the lack of clarity in the movement’s goals (which I discussed in an earlier post). It’s easy (but not entirely accurate) to see the movement as a cry for help from those in […]